Lit Life

We had Harry Caray. Why not Harry Bosch?

May 17, 2009|By Julia Keller

Nobody knows more about close calls than a cop -- even a fictional one.

Which means that Harry Bosch, the character created by Michael Connelly and made famous in a series of popular crime novels set in Los Angeles, might derive some sly ironic pleasure out of a simple fact:

Had things gone just a little bit differently for Connelly, Bosch would have been stirring up trouble in Chicago, not L.A.

In retrospect, of course, Bosch's association with L.A. seems ordained. Bosch is L.A. He's as L.A. as the Hollywood sign and Venice Beach. Thanks to Connelly's stark and briskly entertaining books, which began with "The Black Echo" (1992), the City of Angels is now best known among mystery fans for three things: freeways, Botox and Bosch.

But it might not have turned out that way at all. Bosch could very well have been a Chicagoan. It would've been the Dan Ryan, not the 405, across which Bosch's car streaked as he pursued some murderous thug. It would've been a fussy bureaucrat in Chicago, not L.A., with whom the headstrong Bosch tangled.

The same is true of Connelly's other major character, newspaper reporter Jack McEvoy, who first showed up in a nifty thriller titled "The Poet" (1996). McEvoy covers the crime beat for the Los Angeles Times. Yet it could've been the Chicago Tribune.

As Connelly prepared to kick off a book tour for his 20th novel, "The Scarecrow" (Little, Brown), which will include a stop in Chicago on May 27, he discussed the twist of fate that made Bosch a member of the LAPD instead of the CPD, and that put McEvoy's byline in the Times instead of the Tribune.

"I wanted to write crime novels and I thought a crime novel should be set in a big city," Connelly said in a phone interview from his Florida home.

After graduating from the University of Florida, he took newspaper jobs in Daytona Beach and Ft. Lauderdale. He wanted to learn the craft of writing, Connelly said, and his father advised him that journalism would be a great training ground. When a story that Connelly co-wrote was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, he received calls from editors at the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times.

Both interviews went well -- but the Times was first to offer him a job. So, he headed west.

While covering the police beat for the Times, Connelly got the idea for a lonely, chain-smoking cop with a checkered past and a yen for jazz. His name was Hieronymus Bosch. He was called Harry.

"These were the kinds of books I liked," said Connelly, who communicates in the same slightly gruff, straight-ahead style that his fictional detective does. "The books that spoke to me were the ones with big-city stories, the ones with big issues at stake. From Day One, I thought of the newspaper job as a research project." He wanted to get the goods, the raw material from which he could shape compelling stories.

"For the first six or seven years, I wasn't selling anything," Connelly said of his early attempts at novel-writing. He did it at night and on weekends, after finishing his shift at the Times. "But I was enjoying the process. I was always writing a story that I would want to read. And I could tell that I was getting better at it."

Was he ever. Once readers got their first taste of Bosch in "The Black Echo," they kept coming back for more.

Fourteen years ago, with his novels racking up big sales numbers, Connelly quit his reporter's job to write full time. He and his wife and daughter moved from California to Florida.

"The Scarecrow," which is scheduled to be published May 26, is about a serial killer tracked down by McEvoy. The next Bosch novel, "9 Dragons," will be published in the fall, Connelly said.

One of the subplots in "Scarecrow" is the fate of the newspaper business. When the novel opens, McEvoy has just been laid off by the Times, a casualty of yet another round of staff cuts, a situation that mirrors the woes of newspapers in the real world. Instead of brooding and cursing at his employers, though, McEvoy decides to go out with his head high and his standards intact: He'll write the best story of his life.

And that story -- which starts out with a murder in a gang-riddled section of town and ends up at a sophisticated computer security firm on the trail of a serial killer -- reunites McEvoy with Rachel Walling, the FBI agent who worked with him in the pages of "The Poet."

Like all of Connelly's work, the story moves quickly. There's a deep pleasure in reading about the methodical work of a craftsman, be he a journalist such as McEvoy or a cop such as Bosch. No matter what they're doing or where they are -- Los Angeles or Chicago or somewhere else -- people who take pride in their work have a touch of nobility about them.

That's how McEvoy sees it, anyway. In "The Scarecrow," while showing a younger journalist the ropes, he tells her that cops "have a hidden nobility. The good ones, I mean."

Some writers have that quality too. If you ask Connelly how he deals with criticism or setbacks, you can hear the tough-guy shrug in his voice: "You gotta keep your head down and write," he said, sounding an awful lot like a guy named Bosch.

Crime writers in town

Michael Connelly and fellow crime writer George Pelecanos will appear in Chicago on May 27. At 12:30 p.m., they will be at the Borders at 150 N. State St.; at 7:30 p.m., at the Barnes & Noble at Old Orchard Center in Skokie.